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Even if you don’t yet know the name Hamish Linklater, you probably know his co-stars: Jesse Tyler Ferguson (two Shakespeare in the Parks), Alan Rickman (Broadway’s “Seminar”), Julie Louis-Dreyfus (TV’s “The New Adventures of Old Christine”—Linklater played her brother, the manny). Now he’s back in TV’s “The Crazy Ones,” starring Robin Williams as a very un-Don Draper-like ad man. “It’s a controlled chaos,” Linklater says. “The show is scripted, but [Williams] asks for a round and off he goes. He’s incredibly sweet and tender, too. You’ll be talking about your children together, then find yourself talking to an old Russia woman comparing Sputnik to Challenger. Suddenly, you’re doing it, too!” Here’s what’s in Linklater’s library.

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson

I was visiting my mom in a small town in Scotland where you ask the bookseller what’s good to read there. He said, “Per Petterson. He’s a master.” This is a wonderfully bleak book by a Norwegian who writes prose you can just lay down and have a long weep in. Every year, it seems, there’s a new translation of his Out Stealing Horses” and other books.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

This is a novel based on E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” but reset in a fictional suburb of Boston, where I went to high school, and set in that world of craziness and politics. It’s the best book written in English in the last 10 years, unless her “White Teeth” was written then, in which case Ms. Smith’s in a dead heat with herself.

Matilda by Roald Dahl

This is bedtime reading with my daughter, who’s 6. It’s such a wonderful empowerment story, about a young girl in a world filled with awful people. Someone wise once told me it’s a parent’s job to mitigate your child’s fears. The wickedness in Dahl’s books is an invaluable teaching tool in that effort.

Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater

This is reverse nepotism: The author is my grandfather, and this novel made him a star when it was first published in 1929. It’s about a down-on-his-luck poet who takes over a pub where a motley crew assembles and drinks too much. International intrigue ensues, and then there’s a car chase. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. Get ready to dog-ear your pages!